How to Invent a New Genre

✏️ Cause you're a bad ass like that ✏️

First, don’t forget to get your free pass HERE to the virtual Creatorwood Summit taking place September 28th from 12 pm ET to 8 pm ET.

It’s the ultimate event to help storytellers turn their books into shows and movies with AI and make money selling films directly to viewers.

Now onto today’s article👇…

Have you ever wondered how all the genres of storytelling came to be?

They were invented. Just like chairs, tables, windows, and objects that we can see and touch in the physical world.

As a storyteller, you likely aren’t planning on inventing the next generation chair that levitates (honestly, a levitating chair would freak me out 🤣).

But you may just invent the next big genre. Let me explain…

There’s something distinct that separates the invention of a chair from the invention of a genre such as romantasy.

• Chairs sit in the realm of objective reality. It has a presence that exists independent of someone’s feelings or thoughts. Don’t know the chair exists? Well, too bad… it still does.

• Romantasy sits in the realm of intersubjective reality. It is not real in a physical sense, but as a belief and concept held in the minds of many… it is very real.

Objective Reality = It Just Is.

Intersubjective Reality = It Is Because A Group of People Believes It.

As you can probably tell from our brief analysis… storytelling as an art exists firmly in the realm of intersubjective reality.

Passionate fandoms like Star Wars are very real… and have even brought that story to life in ways that now merge a once fictional reality with our objective reality (just go to Disney World and you will see the power of what happens when an intersubjective reality becomes something we merge with objective reality).

Now, what does this have to do with us – everyday indie authors who surely don’t have the force of Star Wars behind us? (at least not yet) 😉

Genre is an Intersubjective Reality.

Think about it: a genre is not considered a “genre” unless a ton of people and institutions agree. Likewise, something can be considered a genre for one person, whereas another person or institution disagrees with that notion.

Here’s a prime example: LitRPG has exploded in popularity over the last decade. What was once an emerging form of literature is now a genre read by tens of millions each year.

But… Amazon, the singular most powerful institution in book publishing, still doesn’t recognize it as a genre in any of its categories, despite LitRPG books regularly dominating the sales charts.

Genres, subgenres, sub-sub genres, and sub-sub-sub genres (where are the dom genres? ifykyk 🤣) are all social constructs.

Just like you can construct a chair out of matter, you can construct a genre out of words.

And this may just be your most powerful marketing tool yet.

What if you just created a Story Gap?

OGs here will remember my article on story gaps a while back.

It’s one of my foundational teachings for storytellers since it takes so many of the first principles of what makes a book work in the market and brings it to something that’s applicable to your craft [psst… you can read my article on story gaps here].

TLDR: a Story Gap is something that readers crave but that current books in the market aren’t delivering. Here are the general types of Story Gaps:

• Story component (think trope, character type, setting, theme, etc.)

• Packaging (think medium or format like unique special editions, digital formats, scratch & dent, and more)

• Messaging (think marketing channel, story category/genre, copy, and even content and advertising format)

With the launch of Creatorwood next month, I’ve been thinking a lot Story Gaps. It feels like there’s this rare moment of time where there are thousands of story gaps easily exploitable in film.

Hollywood produces 600 scripted shows and movies per year. Meanwhile, 2.7 million+ books are published each year.

Think about how much opportunity there is to bring genres in books to life on screen that have never had the opportunity?

It’s like the ultimate blue ocean of story gaps.

But… there’s even more opportunity beneath the surface in books, specifically when it comes to messaging story gaps.

3 Steps to Inventing Your Own Genre

You can make a book stand out, by inventing a new genre. Don’t fit into the neat expectations of existing subgenres?

Instead of trying to force your book into a shelf that it doesn’t fit on… we can build a new one from the ground up.

When done right, we can attract new readers to our books, stand out to the right people, and create a language network effect around our story that fuels sales for years to come.

Step #1: Figure out what makes your story unique. Is it a specific combination of tropes, a unique main character or love interest, or a specific audience that you are writing for? In coaching sessions, I’ve helped folks nail down what “their” genre could be.

The key is making it sufficiently differentiated by combining elements from other genres and stories in unique ways.

Step #2: Name Your Genre. Make it clear, build on the language used by existing genres and subgenres, and understand what you want your genre to be a sub-genre of.

This is where Paranormal Women’s Fiction did a fantastic job! This was a very deliberate effort by a collective of authors to invent a new genre. And it worked! You can read about it here.

Step #3: Work with other storytellers who want to write in the new genre. The more people you get writing in the new genre you’ve invented, the better. It increases the pool of readers you all get to benefit from. And it creates a language network effect – the more people that come to believe a genre is real, the faster it spreads along with the stories in it.

And that’s it for this one. If you were to invent a new genre, what would it be?

I’ll see you all for another episode of the Beyond the Book Podcast soon. In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick